Abilene Zoo in Texas is the only zoo in its region. It experiences incredible market penetration, but is still a small, municipal parks department zoo—20 acres and 250k visitors. With potential land to grow and new adjacent attractions opening soon, the zoo is poised to grow into a large facility.

Frank Buck Zoo is a small zoo in a small town. Although today the zoo is experiencing a massive market penetration, the zoo’s lack of identity and differentiation means future success is dependent on creating strong repeatable experiences for it’s local / regional resident visitors.

The Caldwell Zoo in Tyler, Texas is a large ‘small’ zoo located in a small town. Drawing 250,000 in annual attendance from a drive time of about 1.5 hours, the family zoo is a great example of the best of small zoos—lovingly and thoughtfully designed using a blend of modern, innovative zoo design techniques with clean, timeless designs and light touches of theming set in a lush landscape with water features. A timeless, beautiful zoo borne from love—and a desire to be a community asset.

The 20-acre private zoo tucked into the hillside on the outskirts of growing Austin, Texas metro has plenty of challenges to tackle, but the beauty of the site and its proximity to Austin (and being the only zoo within an easy drive of the city) means the Zoo has almost unlimited untapped potential to become very successful—and a “weird” little gemstone to the community.

Landscape immersion, which is a type of design intended to "immerse" the visitor in the same natural habitat as the animal, effectively began with the Woodland Park Zoo's gorilla exhibit. Created by zoo design godfathers Grant Jones and Jon Coe as a collaboration with Woodland Park then-director David Hancocks and biologist Dennis Paulson, they coined the term landscape immersion, and thus began the philosophical shift from a homocentric view of zoos to a biocentric view. We now spend massive amounts of resources re-creating "natural" places and cultural phenomena, in an effort to connect people to the earth; to inspire respect of natural places. Back in 1978, this style of design was fresh, new, innovative, revolutionary; nearly thirty years later, the style has become so a part of zoo culture that any exhibit not designed in this manner is questioned for its validity and chances of success. However, should landscape immersion continue to be our design standard? How do we push to the next step beyond landscape immersion?

True and successful landscape immersion requires designers to experience a habitat first-hand before beginning to design a re-creation of it. They research the essence of the habitat, the ecosystem structure within the habitat, and the natural ebbs and flows the habitat would undergo. The animal is an integral part of the ecosystem, not just the centerpiece of a painted scene. The visitor is whisked away to another world, drastically different from the asphalt sidewalks and ice cream shops of the zoo midway. Today's landscape immersion is, too often, not this. Today's landscape immersion usually means planting the visitor space with the same plants as seen in the animal exhibit, and using props from a culture as shade structures, means to hide back-of-house buildings, and educational interpretives. Moreover, today's visitor to a modern zoo no longer has their breath taken away by a landscape immersion exhibit; they simply expect to be immersed in an animal's habitat. The magic of landscape immersion is gone. Along with that, the opportunity to educate and inspire is waning, because, as Coe has said himself, "Only the emotional side, in the end, has the power to generate changes in behavior" (Powell, 1997). If the "oh my" moment is gone, does education stand a chance?

Landscape immersion does not generate longer experiences, as commonly believed. This can easily be shown true by simply observing visitor behavior at exhibits. After studying visitor length-of-stay time at viewing areas, little to no difference can be observed between the old, concrete moated tiger exhibit at Philadelphia Zoo and the landscape and cultural immersion tiger exhibit at Disney's Animal Kingdom. The average maximum stay time of 90 seconds has been consistently shown through observations at other exhibits as well, including the gorilla exhibit and bongo exhibit at Cincinnati Zoo, and the polar bear exhibits at Detroit Zoo and Louisville Zoo. Despite renovations and millions of dollars spent on landscape, rockwork, and interpretives, the most we can expect of our visitors is a minute and a half. Is this time shorter now than at immersion exhibits in the early 1980's? What can we do now to increase this time? Or, what can we do to get the most impact for our minute and a half?

One of the biggest complaints against landscape immersion is the difficulty, generally, in spotting and clearly seeing the animals. Therefore, proximity to animals should be a chief concern in exhibit design. Visitors want to experience something special. They want to do something no one else gets to do; something they have never done. Most importantly, in doing these things, visitors feel connected to the animals. Creating the connection should be of the utmost concern for designers and zoos.

Another component lacking in modern zoo design (not just landscape immersion specifically) is the integration of behavioral enrichment into the basic design process. Too often behavioral enrichment is an aspect of the exhibit that is not addressed by zoos to the architectural designer, even if the behavioral enrichment program is being developed concurrently. Most zoos still see the enrichment program as a separate aspect of the new exhibit to be implemented by the keepers after the exhibit is opened. Most architectural designers are ignorant to the importance of behavioral enrichment as a means not only to increase the health and welfare of the animal, but also in creating an active exhibit with active animals, which translates into longer stay times. Thus, enrichment generally is not addressed as an aspect of design, and ultimately we see beautiful new landscape immersion exhibits with large orange boomer balls and blue plastic barrels. Can these be considered cultural props? Recently, behavioral enrichment has been integrated beautifully into primate exhibits, but what about ungulates and big cats?

Connection creation and enrichment are the two most important issues that we must address in order to move beyond landscape immersion. The complexity of stepping beyond landscape immersion may seem a daunting task. However, the essence of the next successful step will be in creating "novelty"-something new or unexpected. Novelty to visitors, both within every new exhibit they encounter, as well as within the same exhibit upon repeat visits. We must create novelty to animals, both in new enrichment devices and methods, as well as within their own habitats. We need to make adaptable habitats that can be changed on a daily, weekly, monthly or seasonal basis. We need to make experiences for the visitor and animal that they can share, becoming intuitively novel, since every person or animal will react slightly different in new situations. Thus, our new exhibits will stay new, increasing visitor repeat attendance, and discouraging cookie cutter exhibit design.

But how do we begin to do this? In addressing the issues of connection creation and incorporation of enrichment into design, the first and most critical step will be to develop stronger relationships between architectural designers and zoo staff. Designers need to be educated by the keepers on animals' behaviors, both in the wild and in captivity, as well as on methods of behavioral enrichment. Designers should spend a day or two working side-by-side with the keepers as "keepers for a day." This will help designers to not only understand the needs of the keepers in their daily work routines, but also to help create bonds between designers and the animals whose homes they are creating. The zoo staff has a passion for animals that most architectural designers are lacking. This passion needs to be shared and experienced by the designers.

In "novelty-based" design, zoos and designers need to work together to develop new methods of enrichment and test them before integrating them into design. Design schedules and budgets should include a phase for enrichment development and testing, wherein the designers work with the keepers to create prototypes to be tested with the animals. If the zoo is designing exhibits for animals they currently do not have in collection, partnerships should be developed to test enrichment devices at other zoos with those animals. These findings should be recorded scientifically and published for the entire zoo community to share. If the zoo uses training as enrichment, the designers need to experience training sessions and clearly understand the need and utility of the training. Keepers and designers should be discussing how all of these methods can be displayed on exhibit.

Specific enrichment goals need to be addressed at design kick-off meetings, making numerical goals for incorporating enrichment devices and creating new methods. Enrichment must be seen as a philosophical aspect of design, incorporated into the master planning process, because if animals are active and happy, visitors will become more engaged. Enrichment must be planned not only for the opening day of the exhibit, but for the future of the exhibit as well. Animals become acclimated to enrichment devices and stop using them. We must plan for this, developing phasing plans for enrichment, and flexibility of the exhibit design for novelty of the environment. Most importantly, after the construction is complete, studies must be conducted to determine the successes and failures of enrichment techniques. These results should be shared with the zoo community, and especially, the designers.

Secondly, the "novelty-based" design process must become "connection-centered," not visitor-centered or animal-centered. Connections are created both by proximity and by experience. Landscape immersion began to explore this idea by attempting to have visitors and animals in the same habitat, thus experiencing the same things. However, in landscape immersion, we don't experience the same things at all. As visitors, we have a choice to move into a different area, to eat ice cream or hot dogs, to sit and watch the gorillas or to go see the penguins. We don't swim in the same water as the polar bears and we don't get to swing around on ropes like orangutans. What if we started creating these shared experiences? Can we make environments for animals and visitors that are truly similar? What if the actions of a visitor change the environment for the animal? What if the actions of an animal change the environment for the visitor? No longer would we be bound by the idea that the habitat must look like the animals' wild habitat. We could make it look like any thing, any place, any time, as long as the visitor and animal are engaged and ultimately, connected.

We have already seen a movement starting to push beyond landscape immersion, and, in some instances, toward "novelty-based" design. Several new exhibits, including the St. Louis Zoo ‘Penguin & Puffin Coast' exhibit and the San Francisco Zoo's ‘Lipman Family Lemur Forest', utilize natural habitat but also incorporate distinctly non-immersive elements, and are exceedingly successful. These exhibits focus on getting the visitor close to the animals (connection-centered) and being surrounded by active animals (behavioral understanding and enrichment incorporation). This experience, which will be different and therefore novel upon each visit, makes these exhibits extremely emotional and therefore memorable to visitors, and begins to create a connection. These exhibits are a step in the right direction toward "novelty-based" design. Using this type of design, we can move to the next incremental step in the evolution of landscape immersion, keeping the "oh my!" moment, and continuing to educate and inspire our zoo visitors.

The question of co-evolution amongst zoos, aquaria, and science museums has been a lingering muse for decades now. Back in 1986, Jon Coe cleverly equated the historical relationships to convergent evolution, and through his paper, which was more history lesson than predictor of the future, compared their similarities through time. Ultimately, he suggests "an awareness of others and ourselves, together with a willingness to communicate, can lead us further into an exciting co-evolution of zoo, aquariums and natural history museums."
I'd like to take it a step further.

I often wonder why we separate all of our science institutions, dividing the natural world into equal, but succinct pieces: land animal (zoos), plant (botanical gardens), aquatic animal (aquaria), and the sciences (natural history museums and science centers). Of course, overlap occurs; zoos have fish and aquatic mammals, botanical gardens have butterfly houses, science museums have dioramas of the natural history of living creatures. Additionally, the method of teaching the general sciences varies greatly from conservative natural history museum approaches to more "fun" and interactive science centers.

As Coe mentioned, the teaming up of these institutions would be a powerful force. However, if, going beyond what Coe suggested, we created one institution that presented all of these disciplines, we'd be teaching holistically, presenting a unified view of the natural world that so many children and adults rarely get the chance to see.

The world has changed dramatically since the inception of these learning institutions. Most zoos and natural history museums began at the turn of the 19th century, when for the good majority of people, we still lived in a mostly untouched rurality. These people grew up with nature, lived in nature, or could easily visit nature, and learning about the natural world was most easily understood by the breaking down of components.

Today, however, most people live in cities or suburbs. Any nature we experience regularly is man-made or man-influenced, and certainly does not contain a wide variety of species or habitats. Learning about nature now becomes easier through an immersive, holistic approach. Add in society's constant bombardment with story driven entertainment and eye-candy, and learning almost requires the same treatment. Or so I postulate.

The Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina has already come to the same conclusion. Currently, they house live animals, present botanical displays, a natural wetland trail, and incorporate hands-on science center activities throughout. This is not enough for them, however.

We envision a one-of-a-kind place, a science park, offering extraordinary experiences indoors, outdoors, and virtual where children and adults learn through the pursuit of their own interests and curiosity. We will be recognized as the leader in public engagement with science in the Triangle region and as a model for science museums across the nation.

Will this be the future of science institutions? A one-stop shop, so to speak, for education and entertainment about the natural world? All things are intertwined; nature is a web of life. Why not present it that way?

Over ten years ago, Jon Coe wrote a paper outlining the upcoming breakthroughs in exhibit design, using enrichment based (or as he says, activity-based) design. These exhibits have now been opened and are successful. However, ten years from the original date of the paper, designers still have not fully embraced the design concept. Incorporating enrichment devices into an exhibit is one thing; to fully base design on enrichment or activity, is an entirely different animal.
As Coe points out, however, design is not fully the designers' decision. A new animal habitat has many stakeholders, and even if the designer supports the idea of basing design on enrichment, the entire team of administrators, keepers, curators, and Board of Directors, not to mention all members of the design team, must also agree.

In many cases, the resources (of time, money, and/or space) just aren't there. Many times, the decision comes down to making an immersive environment or making an enriching environment. Unfortunately, many folks in the industry still hold onto the idea that an immersive environment equals animal health and activity, or at least, equal visitor satisfaction. However, active animals are much more powerful than a pretty environment, and we must work on our clients to understand this.